You've finally figured out what you want to do with your life start

a company, launch a website, design an app, or found a nonprofit. The only problem is that you can't afford to quit your
current job in order to pursue it fulltime. So, where should you
start? What's the best way to get your passion project moving?
And how can you tell when you're ready to strike out on your
own?

Knowing where your professional passions lie puts you in a good

position. Lots of people don't know what they want to do. They're
struggling because they know they're not happy doing what
they're doing, but they don't know what else is out there. An idea
is certainly a promising start, but executing it while holding down
a busy fulltime job is undoubtedly a challenge. You've nailed the
one percent inspiration; now it's time for the 99% perspiration. If
you are committed to making it happen, there are ways. So, here
are some suggestions to get your idea up and running.
Begin by sketching out exactly what it is you want to achieve. Is it
a large, scalable company? Is it a small company? Is it a
charitable organization? You want to have specific, concrete goals
to shoot for, including revenue targets and desired social impact.
Next, make a timeline based on what you think you can
reasonably accomplish towards your project in the time you have.
Your biggest constraint is how many hours you have to devote to
this side project, so commit to an end-date when you'd ideally like
to leave your job and solve backwards from there. As you chip
away on your project, continue to give your job the attention it
needs. Your day job takes precedence. You must also be willing to
extend your timeline if your proposed end-date doesn't seem
realistic the closer you get.
Having financial security gives you the opportunity to build your
business on your terms. But if your ultimate goal is to one day
leave your job and devote yourself fulltime to your project, you
will need a financial cushion " particularly to get you through the

early stages of your new venture. Your timeline should include

clearly defined savings targets for each month or quarter and " if
necessary " a plan for raising money from investors. If you don't
have sufficient funds when you leave your job, you will make bad
business decisions out of fear.
You should list the concrete skills you need to develop in order to
be successful at pursuing your passion full-time. Once you have a
list of necessary skills, figure out how to acquire them. Perhaps
you need to take a class; maybe an internship or apprenticeship is
in order. Identify ways to stretch your job description to learn new
skills. For example, if knowing how to build websites will be
important to your new venture, see if your current job will
subsidize a class in web design that will also help you in your
current job.

Compared to the eternal cosmos envisaged by the ancients, our

own universe is something of a Johnny-come-lately. It seems to
have been around a mere 14 billion years or so, beginning with
the Big Bang. And its future may well be bounded too. According
to current cosmological scenarios, it is destined either to
disappear abruptly in a Big Crunch some eons down the road, or
to fade gradually into a dark and chill nothingness.

The temporal finitude of our universe here today (but not

yesterday), gone tomorrow makes its existence seem all the
more insecure and contingent. And mysterious. A world with solid
ontological foundations, it seems, just wouldn't behave like this. It
would exist eternally and imperishably. Such a world, unlike the
finite Big Bang universe, would have an aura of self-sufficiency. It
might even harbour the cause of its own being.
But what if our universe is not all there is? What if it is a part of
some greater ensemble?

One of the great lessons of the history of science is that reality

always turns out to be more encompassing than anyone
imagined. At the beginning of the twentieth century, our universe
was thought to consist of just the Milky Way galaxy, sitting all by
itself in an infinite space. Since then, we have learned that the
Milky Way is merely one of a hundred billion or so similar galaxies.
And that's just the observable universe. The current theory that
best explains the Big Bang is called the 'new inflationary
cosmology'. As it happens, this theory predicts that universeengendering explosions like the Big Bang should be a fairly
routine occurrence. (As one friend of mine observed, it would be
very odd if the Big Bang came with a label that said, 'This
mechanism operated only once.')
In the inflationary scenario, our universe the one that suddenly
popped into existence some 14 billion years ago bubbled out of
the spacetime of a preexisting universe. Instead of being all of
physical reality, it's just an infinitesimal part of an everreproducing 'multiverse'. Although each of the bubble universes
within this multiverse had a definite beginning in time, the entire
self-replicating ensemble may be infinitely old. The eternity that
seemed lost with the discovery of the Big Bang is thus regained.
With an eternal world whether of the inflationary variety or
some other there is no inexplicable 'creation moment'. There is
no role for a 'first cause'. There are no arbitrary 'initial conditions'.
An eternal world thus seems to satisfy the Principle of Sufficient
Reason. The way it is at any moment can be explained by the way
it was the previous moment. Indeed, its existence at any moment
can be explained by its existence the previous moment. Should
that be enough to dispel any lingering sense of mystery?